Pope John Paul II spoke out yesterday in remembrance of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, praying that a new relationship between Christians and Jews would be born from “sorrow over this tragedy.”After praying at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, the principal Israeli monument to those who perished in the Holocaust, the Pope asked that there would be no more hatred but only respect between the two faiths.”There are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah [the Hebrew word for the Holocaust],” said the pontiff in what was obviously a highly emotional moment. To reinforce its importance to him, he spoke of his childhood in Poland and of Jewish friends lost in the Holocaust. “My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the war. I remember Jewish friends and neighbors, some of whom perished, while others survived.”He was greeted by six Jewish Holocaust survivors, including a childhood friend. The Pope also met 30 Jews living in Israel, who, like him, were originally from Wadowice, Poland. The Pope was accompanied by Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak, whose mother’s parents were killed in a Nazi death camp in Poland.”I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people, who, stripped of everything, especially of their human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust,” the pontiff said. “More than half a century has passed, but the memories remain.””How can we fail to heed their cry?” he said of the Holocaust’s millions of victims. “No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale. We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for the millions of innocent victims of Nazism.”Asking how men could have such utter contempt for their fellow human beings, the Pope said the reason was that men “had reached the point of contempt for God. … Only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people.”But the Pope said the honor given by the State of Israel at Yad Vashem to those “just Gentiles” who had acted heroically to save Jews, sometimes giving up their own lives, was a sign of great hope. It was, he said, “a recognition that not even in the darkest hour is every light extinguished.”The Book of Psalms, and the whole Bible, though commenting on the human capacity for evil, also proclaimed that “evil will not have the last word,” he added.On the more general issue of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, Pope John Paul said that Jews and Christians shared an immense “spiritual patrimony” from God’s self-revelation.”Our religious teachings and our spiritual experience demand that we overcome evil with good,” he said.The pontiff said that both Jews and Christians remembered the Holocaust not with any desire for vengeance or hatred, but to commit themselves to the cause of peace and justice and to avoid repeating the terrible mistakes and crimes of the past.”As Bishop of Rome and successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place,” he said.”The church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the Creator inherent in every human being.”In this place of solemn remembrance, I fervently pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people suffered in the 20th century will lead to a new relationship between Christians and Jews. Let us build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Jewish feeling among Christians or anti-Christian feeling among Jews, but rather the mutual respect required of those who adore the one Creator and Lord, and look to Abraham as our common father in faith.”While much of today’s speech is likely to be well received here and abroad, it is unlikely to satisfy the many Jews who want a specific apology by the Catholic Church for failing to save more Jewish lives and, in particular, for the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust itself. For many Jews his silence amounted to complicity with the genocide. However, senior Vatican officials insist that Pius XII did his best to help the Jews behind the scenes, and that if the church had spoken out strongly, more lives might have been put in danger.Shevach Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Yad Vashem Council, told Ecumenical News International (ENI) that the papal visit was about more than apologies. “The fact that he is here is the most important issue and event. We don’t need apologetic declarations,” he said. “We lost six million brothers and sisters, parents, grandparents, grandmothers, grandfathers. The importance is vis-a-vis the Christian people, especially more than a billion Catholics around the world.”As a small boy during the Holocaust, Weiss was hidden by a Christian family, in the region of Poland where John Paul grew up. He told ENI the Pope had done more than any other Catholic pontiff to improve Christian-Jewish relations. This could, he said, be at least partly explained by the Pope’s Polish roots. After the war, John Paul had helped some Jewish Holocaust survivors to be reunited with their families, Weiss said.Copyright © 2000 Ecumenical News International. Used with permission.
Related Elsewhere
The Pope’s speech is available from the
Vatican, the
Associated Press, and the
BBC.CNN offers video of both the
Pope’s and
Barak’s speeches.Pope John Paul II was
criticized for not directly apologizing for the church’s record during the Holocaust, reports The Associated Press.
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